Union Extortion

Big Labor: Union organizers reportedly are telling South Carolina Boeing workers they'll halt a National Labor Relations Board action to shut their plant as long as the workers join their union. What contempt for workers!

That's right, the International Association of Machinists (IAM), the very union that's trying to put 1,000 workers out on the unemployment lines in Charleston, S.C., through a complaint filed through the National Labor Relations Board, is now trying to force workers to join their union anyway, says a report last week in the Daily Caller.

This is just the latest way the organization that proclaims itself the great defender of "the middle class" is not only making life bad for Boeing and businesses watching from the sidelines, but making life particularly miserable for workers by trying to impose something on them that they don't want.

South Carolina is a right-to-work state that Boeing chose as an ideal location for its new 787 Dreamliner assembly plant to employ 1,000 workers.

That was too much for Boeing's Washington state-based IAM union, which filed suit with the NLRB, even though it lost no workers. The unions claimed "retaliation" for all the strikes they foisted on Boeing in the past. And the NLRB — Obama's handpicked board of union hacks — went right along with it.

So in addition to the IAM complaint against Boeing, Boeing's workers have to deal with IAM as the thing that wouldn't leave.

Two years ago, workers of Vought Aircraft Industries, whose plant was bought by Boeing, voted to decertify their IAM union. Why? As in so many such cases — the airline industry being one of them — workers made more money as nonunion workers than as union ones.

Unwilling to take "no" for an answer, the union is back, lurking around plants and darkening workers' doorways, telling them to bring them back, the Daily Caller reported. It looks a lot like intimidation, not organizing.

Worse, though, is the union's outrageous vow to use political pull with the Seattle union to end the NLRB's effort to shut down the South Carolina plant.

Americans for Tax Reform calls that extortion, at least as it's defined by Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. "IAM is clearly obtaining something of value — costly union dues — by use of force, fear and threats — if they unionized, IAM leadership will get the NLRB to drop the controversial complaint," the group said.

Big Labor: Union organizers reportedly are telling South Carolina Boeing workers they'll halt a National Labor Relations Board action to shut their plant as long as the workers join their union. What contempt for workers!

That's right, the International Association of Machinists (IAM), the very union that's trying to put 1,000 workers out on the unemployment lines in Charleston, S.C., through a complaint filed through the National Labor Relations Board, is now trying to force workers to join their union anyway, says a report last week in the Daily Caller.

This is just the latest way the organization that proclaims itself the great defender of "the middle class" is not only making life bad for Boeing and businesses watching from the sidelines, but making life particularly miserable for workers by trying to impose something on them that they don't want.

South Carolina is a right-to-work state that Boeing chose as an ideal location for its new 787 Dreamliner assembly plant to employ 1,000 workers.

That was too much for Boeing's Washington state-based IAM union, which filed suit with the NLRB, even though it lost no workers. The unions claimed "retaliation" for all the strikes they foisted on Boeing in the past. And the NLRB — Obama's handpicked board of union hacks — went right along with it.

So in addition to the IAM complaint against Boeing, Boeing's workers have to deal with IAM as the thing that wouldn't leave.

Two years ago, workers of Vought Aircraft Industries, whose plant was bought by Boeing, voted to decertify their IAM union. Why? As in so many such cases — the airline industry being one of them — workers made more money as nonunion workers than as union ones.

Unwilling to take "no" for an answer, the union is back, lurking around plants and darkening workers' doorways, telling them to bring them back, the Daily Caller reported. It looks a lot like intimidation, not organizing.

Worse, though, is the union's outrageous vow to use political pull with the Seattle union to end the NLRB's effort to shut down the South Carolina plant.

Americans for Tax Reform calls that extortion, at least as it's defined by Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. "IAM is clearly obtaining something of value — costly union dues — by use of force, fear and threats — if they unionized, IAM leadership will get the NLRB to drop the controversial complaint," the group said.

So the agency President Obama describes as "independent" and out of his purview — as he did a few weeks ago when he attempted to dodge a question from a reporter about NLRB's investigation of Boeing — isn't so independent and impartial after all?

What better admission that the NLRB is nothing but a tool of collusion, political muscle and cronyism?

If the NLRB's lawyers are participating in talks with IAM to withdraw the complaint on the condition that workers join the union, then this is no longer an action against Boeing — it becomes an action against the now-independent workers themselves.

What kind of union that purports to represent the interests of workers would explicitly demand they act against their own wishes, especially by threatening to bankrupt their employer and put them out of a paycheck?

If this is what passes for "acting in the workers' interests," where does the line stop? Maybe Congress should start looking into this clearly emerging outline of extortion — not just against Boeing, but its workers, too.

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